Fifteen meetings with world leaders, eight press conferences, six countries, three summits, two continents, one cold and — in the words of a White House aide yesterday — “no screw-ups”.
It is this last statistic that, perhaps, matters most. A week-long odyssey, breathtaking in the scale of its ambition and mind-frazzling in terms of logistical intensity, was Barack Obama’s debut on the world stage. At every stop there were potential hazards for a President whose critics in Washington are lining up to dismiss him as inexperienced and naive.
Yet he neither fluffed his lines, nor put a foot wrong. Mr Obama and his team strode through the week even in their final destination of Iraq, which they succeeded in keeping a secret until his aircraft was in the air.
The avoidance of disaster was an achievement, especially when measured against the record of President Bush. Although Mr Obama was always assured of a welcome from a European public still enraptured with him, he also knew that any significant slip would have further tainted an Administration that has begun to lose some of its lustre at home.
The image that will linger instead is of the excitement, energy and awe generated wherever he — or the First Lady — went. The President sometimes appeared to be back on the campaign trail as he hosted town hall meetings and delivered uplifting speeches.
If Europe was doing its best to turn itself into Iowa, Mr Obama sought to accommodate local sensibilities: dropping French, Czech and Turkish words into speeches; shaking hands with the policeman outside Downing Street and gracefully sidestepping the Duke of Edinburgh, who greeted the first black American president with a comment about the difficulty of recognising all those funny foreigners he was meeting.
Those leaders were often no less starry-eyed than members of the public. One official described the sight of jaws collectively dropping at the European Union summit in Prague when Mr Obama dealt with every question thrown at him with “honesty, thoughtfulness and humility” — qualities that they neither have in abundance themselves, nor are accustomed to receiving from American presidents.
David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, said that he detected an “Obama effect” in bringing potentially fractious summits together.
Tangible results from all these talks and all that love are, however, harder to find. Boasts about the size of stimulus spending agreed by the G20 should be treated with scepticism and the summit’s communiqué may yet join a list of others that had little more binding force than New Year resolutions.
Large pinches of salt should also be taken with claims that Nato allies had agreed to send an additional 5,000 troops to Afghanistan. This military surge is but a trickle compared with the extra 21,000 soldiers Mr Obama is sending, although much of it is temporary and some had already been pledged to President Bush.
White House officials, however, said that such an analysis fails to recognise the work he has done to remove the foreign policy impediments caused by a perception of American arrogance or double-standards.
Such efforts in the past eight days included a call for a world free of nuclear weapons, a meeting with Dmitri Medvedev, the Russian President, to discuss immediate ways of cutting their number and a solemn declaration at the Turkish parliament that the United States would never be at war with Islam.
On his first day back in Washington yesterday Mr Obama’s Administration promised to join Russian, Chinese and European allies at the negotiating table with Iran to break the diplomatic logjam that has so long characterised the debate over the nuclear programme of Tehran.
David Axelrod, the senior adviser to the President, said that the seeds sown in the past week would bear fruit in years to come, adding: “You plant, you cultivate, you harvest.”
He made specific reference to opinion polls showing how the image of the US had improved in Europe and ridiculed suggestions that more should have been achieved.
“Why didn’t the waters part, the Sun shine and all ills of the world disappear because President Obama came to Europe?” Mr Axelrod said.
“That wasn’t our expectation. That will take at least a few weeks.”
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